MINI-Devlog #0 A Return to Form

Hello everyone! We’ve been very quiet the past year and we are quite aware of it. This might seem a bit overdue but we wanted to clear things up with everyone honestly and introduce a way to give steady information that we hope everyone will enjoy.

Clearing things up, in the beginning

Back in the day, we were young, fresh and developing like crazy. We had big goals set up for ourselves, pumped out lots of graphics and systems to get the project going, and had a ton of new content to share. The beginning of every project is always exciting and fast paced, but eventually we like many indie studios, hit a funding problem. To most of the dev team at the time, WIA was only a secondary project, we all had our own jobs that gave us income that we fed into the project whenever we had anything to spare. But as the interest in our game blew up, we quickly went to work trying to find ways we can turn this into something full time. So we went searching for investors…

Finding funding isn’t easy, especially for a brand new company like us. Although we have had lots of interest from big companies, it was clear that WIA was just too early in development for them to feel safe investing in us. Eventually though we did hit gold and found someone willing to help us out, in the form of a licensing agreement. Since they were neither an investor nor a publisher, it allowed us to retain our freedom to make the game we envisioned. However with any such agreements in this industry, there are always balances in place to make sure that work gets done. Normally in the form of Milestones.

As you might have imagined, we were ambitious and developing quickly in the beginning, setting up rather unreasonable goals for ourselves (Hey, remember that alpha release for March 2021?), which reflected in our funding agreements. When we inevitably couldn’t deliver on those insane predictions, we ended up needing to play catch up. Focusing solely on getting to the point that we needed to be for an Alpha instead of continuing forward towards beta, essentially halting progress towards the finish line to fine tune our ride. This is the point where we started going radio silent.

Funny bug recorded a little over a year ago right before our radio silence.

Clearing things up, Silence to now

During our summer of silence we worked quietly on the alpha. Although we had always promised to release an open Alpha for everyone to play, there was never a moment where we were able to sit back and say “yeah, this is something we would like to release to the community”. We ended up spending a ton of time working almost exclusively on back end tasks. Improving the server, fixing bugs, adjusting the level design, tools, gameplay improvements, fighting Unity engine problems etc etc. With no real opportunity to show off anything new and exciting in any devlog format, we did sprinkle in some screenshots here and there in our development channels and patreon, but they weren’t nearly as exciting as our old dev log videos.

Until recently, we had finally gotten to the point that the only further way to improve the game, is to finally get back on the march towards beta. Which means more art and new mechanics to show off! So without further ado, allow us to introduce Mini devlogs!

What are Mini Devlogs?

Mini Devlogs are our answer for keeping everyone up to date with our development without needing to spend time creating videos. Once a month we will be quickly collecting any images and tasks we did throughout the month and briefly talk about it in a small, easy to digest news articles.

This doesn’t mean we are abandoning video devlogs though, once we have compiled enough notes in our mini logs, we will be creating video devlogs showcasing all the neat stuff we showed here in an easy to digest video format. We are very aware that more people will probably enjoy the videos more than reading so we want to make sure to cater to both audiences.

You can expect mini devlogs to showcase new never before seen development experiences from our programming team, as well as neat visuals and art taken from the art department.

Finally

We want to make sure we do things right going forward, which means no more ambitious deadlines or overhyping our community. We want to take things slow and we want to deliver a game we can be proud of so everyone can enjoy what we made. This unfortunately means we will not be sharing any dates of alphas or betas or releases until we are very sure about us hitting these deadlines, we want to make sure we stay honest with all of you and get back to the days where we can share with everyone rare glimpses into mobile indie development!

I know this is a lot of words, we aren’t sure how many of you in the end will actually make it down here in the article or care about all of this, but I wanted to make sure that we remain real and honest with our community and I hope that we can continuing moving forward with this mindset.

Big appreciation to everyone that has stood by us and waited patiently for the game, we apologize for leaving everyone in the dark for so long. I hope we can give you a bigger reward in the future but for now we would like to give you a special sneak peak into next weeks Mini devlog where we will be going over some map overhauls for beta and the elusive IOS support!

Feel free to share these images with everyone!